ashtanga vinyasa yoga links

studying in mysore

Mysore street scene

Mysore Diary - the online diary I kept during my first trip to study with Pattabhi Jois in Mysore, from October 2001 to March 2002.

I also took a lot of pictures. I have a page of pictures of the old yoga shala, which will probably be closing in August 2002, so if you’ve never been there these could be one of your best chances to see what it was like. A lot of the pictures in my general India photo gallery were also taken in & around Mysore, including most of the street and market photos.

A couple of my Mysore contemporaries, Aliette Frank from Washington DC and Cara Jepsen from Chicago, also wrote about their experiences.

Pattabhi Jois’s new yoga shala in Gokulam opened in January 2003. The new shala is further out of town and several miles away from the old shala in Lakshmipuram. Paul Dallaghan has written a very informative article on accommodation, food and other practicalities of yoga student life in Gokulam, on ashtanga.com

Yoga is Youth – another current (January 2004) mysore weblog. Good writing.

general

Pattabhi Jois

What is this “Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga” anyway? Here is the official definition, written by senior teacher Annie Pace and approved by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois.

Terry Slade maintains a huge list of pretty much every piece of ashtanga-related information it’s possible to find on the web, including comprehensive book and video reviews. I have no intention of trying to duplicate anything like that here - that would be pointless.

Carl Nelson has decided, for personal reasons, to close down his website ghita.com.au. Pity - it was one of the more interesting and informative general ashtanga websites. Thanks, Carl, for all the work that went into maintaining it.
UPDATE: Carl is no longer maintaining the site, but has posted an archive version of it here. Still lots of useful information.

online discussion groups

The Yahoo! Ashtanga yoga discussion group used to be pretty lively, but at times any useful constructive discussion got drowned out by abuse and bickering - as is the way of all online discussion groups, even(?) ones about yoga. These days the traffic has pretty much died away to a trickle and yahoo have slapped advertising all over the place, so I don’t bother looking at it much any more.

There’s a lot of useful and interesting stuff among all the noise in the yahoo archives, though, and there used to be no search facility, so for a while I maintained a kind of “selected greatest hits” index.

And when yahoo got too big, noisy and abusive for some people, they left and set up an alternative site at ezboard, where the tone is quite different, and the whole thing is better organised than yahoo and has a search facility too.

friends & family

My long time friend and yoga teacher, Bettina Anner, was the first person in Germany(*) to receive Pattabhi Jois’s official blessing to teach ashtanga vinyasa yoga. This is a big deal, as I explain here.
(Not the first German, but the two before her are expats)

Anne-Marie Newland and I are practically cousins - our families are very close, but we hadn’t actually been in touch for years until we discovered that we’re both now into yoga. She started out as a sivananda teacher (the real sort, studied in India with Devananda, not the one month “teacher training” sort) and now teaches a kind of sivananda-vinyasa fusion style. I went to one of her classes the last time I went home to visit my folks, and had a great time.

… whereas I’ve never actually met this guy, but I’d like to. John has been one of the good guys in the online yoga scene for years under the nom de plume “okrgr”. (I’ve never been able to get into online pseudonyms myself. Just too literal-minded). Now he has a weblog, Days in my Lives.

yogachola.de is the website of Arjuna in Nürnberg, who has an astonishingly advanced practice for one so young - check out the photo gallery

One my Mysore roomates, and an old friend from the very beginning of my yoga studies in Manchester, is Janice Roscoe. She’s now living and teaching yoga in Ottawa, Canada with her brand new husband Stephen, and says one of her students recognised her from her photo in my Indian diary.

P. Vijayan, the massage therapy genius who healed my long time injured knee on my first visit to India, now has his own Ayurvedic centre, Treament House. I really can’t recommend him highly enough.

miscellaneous

Before he opened his own yoga school, Patrick also organised a very impessive series of yoga workshops with visiting teachers in 2002. Details of last year’s workshops, with links to my pictures and reviews of some of them, are here. For current workshops, see the jivamukti münchen website under “workshops”.

Christine Muehling has an interesting project, yogadancer.com, which she describes as a kind of "online Light on Yoga". It’s very ambitious - what she’s trying to put together is a huge compilation of photos and descriptions of every conceivable yoga asana. She has good taste in pictures too - she’s using one of mine.

Purple Valley Yoga Centre, Goa. Annie, who runs this place, emailed me shortly before I went to Mysore and asked if I’d like to link to her website. She seemed nice, but nevertheless I have a policy of no commercial links on this website unless it’s to people I know personally or have done business with, so I declined, politely I hope - “I do hope you won’t be offended if I decline your kind offer to exchange links at this point. If I knew you or had been to your centre it would be different”. Well, I still haven’t met Annie or been to her centre, but while I was in Mysore quite a few people went up to Goa to visit and I heard good things about the place. A friend of mine taught there in March and is going back to teach again in November, so she must think it’s ok. So, finally, here’s your link Annie.
My policy is actually no commercial links on this website unless I know the people personally or have done business with them or they want to sponsor me - Helen from Fuji please take note ;-)

There was an interesting interview with John Scott in the Yoga.co.uk online magazine, where he discussed how he got started with his practice and his teaching. Unfortunately they took it away. When I emailed them they said they only had their current articles online, in the same way as a print magazine. I suggested that - like nearly every other online magazine - they might like to have an “archives” section for old articles, that people could link to without risking getting their links broken. If they ever do make the John Scott piece available again, I’ll link to it again.
I like John, not only because he’s a great yogi and teacher, also because he has excellent taste in yoga photos - there used to be a couple of really interesting photos of him on the web, but sadly the links I had to them are out of date. John’s website.

more

in the interregnum between my Mysore Diary and my current yoga blog, I kept a mini-blog of yoga links & comments. Some of the links (newest from 2003) may still be valid – I haven’t checked them lately.

then del.icio.us started up in January 2005, and I started keeping my links to yoga-related stuff that I don’t feel like writing about at length over there.